She moved her glazed table
and placed it by the front window.
With scissors and ruler in her left hand,
and gauzes and silks in her right hand
she made herself an embroidered padded skirt by morning
and by evening her silk blouse was done.
The gloomy sun was darkening out
when in grief she stepped out of the gate to weep.
The clerk heard how unexpectedly things had changed,
and asked for leave to come home.
About one mile from Lan Zhi's place,
his horse sensed his sadness and neighed.
The woman recognized the horse's whinny,
stepped into her shoes and went to see.
Looking sadly into the distance,
she knew it was her husband.
She raised her hand and beat the saddle,
lamenting with a hurt heart:
“Since you were separated from me,
things have happened unexpectedly
and nothing we wished for has turned out,
though you may not understand the reasons.
I have my parents
and my brothers who have pressured me,
promising me to another man.
And now you're here, expecting what?”
The clerk replied to the woman:
“Congratulations! Congratulations on your rise!
The rock is square and solid,
it stays put for a thousand years
but rushes are tough for just a moment,
changing between dawn and dusk.
Your life will improve day by day,
while I go alone to the Yellow Springs.”
The woman said to her man,
“Why do you say things like this?
We both were forced
—you just the same as I was.
We'll meet down in the Yellow Springs.
Don't go back on what you said today!”
They held hands and then went each their own way,
returning to their homes.
Although alive, they were parted as in death
with bitterness beyond words.
They were determined to leave this world;
its ten thousand things could not pull them back.
The clerk returned to his home
and greeted his mother in the hall:
“Today's high wind is cold,
it has destroyed many trees
and heavy frost encases the orchid.5
Your son is sunsetting,
leaving you alone behind.
I make this bad move by my own choice;
don't complain to gods or ghosts.
I wish you a long life like rock in the South Mountain,
with all your limbs healthy and straight.”
The mother heard the son's words,
her tears came down immediately.
“You are a son from a great family,
a family that has held high offices.
Do not take your life for a woman,
between the noble and the humble, love is nothing!
There is a fine lady from our east neighbor,
her beauty charms the whole city.
Your mother will seek the lady for you,
she will be yours before morning becomes evening.”
The clerk kowtowed again and withdrew,
sighing and sighing in his empty bedroom
even more determined to see out his plan.
He turned his head to the door,
and felt the pressure of anxious sorrow.
That day cows lowed and horses neighed
as the newly wed woman entered the green tent.
Dark and dark, late in the evening,
quiet, so quiet, all the people settled, she said,
“My life is going to end today,
the soul will leave the body behind.”
Lifting her skirt and taking off her silk shoes,
she jumped into a green pond.
When the clerk heard about this,
his heart knew she'd taken the long departure.
He walked back and forth under a tree in the courtyard,
and hanged himself from the southeast branch.
The families decided to bury them together.
They were buried by Flower Mountain.
On the east and west sides, pines and cypress were planted,
left and right, parasol trees,
branches and branches holding hands,
leaves and leaves touching each other
and in the center a pair of flying birds,
the kind called mandarin ducks.
They'd look up and sing to each other
every night till the fifth beat of the drum,
making travelers stop and listen
and widows get up at night and pace.
This is a warning to people of the future:
learn this lesson and never forget this story!
* Compare this poem to the “Nineteen Ancient Poems,” especially numbers 1, 2, 16, 17, and 18. The letter in the carp refers either to wooden fish-shaped letter cases or to actual fish, since in Chinese tradition people sometimes sent secret things packed inside of fish (maps, daggers, letters, and so on).
1 ”Big Mother,” literally “Big Person” (da ren), a title of respect, like “Your Honor;” in this context, a term for the mother-in-law.
2 “Once we bound our hair,” meaning after we came of age. Thus the term for the first wife is the “bound hair wife.”
3 Literally, the line ends “even in Yellow Springs.”
4 The seventh and twenty-ninth were days of rest.
5 The “orchid” refers to his wife, Lan Zhi, whose name means “orchid.”
SIX DYNASTIES PERIOD
(220–589)
AFTER A REVOLT BY A SECRET SOCIETY OF DAOISTS KNOWN AS the Yellow Turbans, the Eastern Han dynasty ruled in name, but three warlords held the true power. Though the great military leader Cao Cao tried to rule through a puppet emperor, he was confronted by two powerful enemies, Liu Bei and Sunquan. In 220, Cao Cao's son proclaimed himself the emperor of the Kingdom of Wei, in 221 Liu Bei became the king of Shu, and in 229 Sunquan became the king of Wu, ushering in a period of great disorder and disunity known as the Six Dynasties Period, which stretched from the end of the Han dynasty in 220 to the reunification of China in the Sui dynasty in 589.
The Six Dynasties Period opens with the Three Kingdoms Period (220–260), as the three powerful kingdoms, the Wei, the Xu, and the Wu, each vied for military dominance. These short-lived empires soon gave way to a dizzying array of kingdoms and dynasties, none of which could manage to reunify China, with the exception of the brief Western Jin dynasty, which was overrun within decades of its founding by northern barbarians. Northern China, the traditional core of Chinese civilization, was given over to foreign rule, and the Chinese retreated to the south, beginning the period known as the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. Only with the Sui dynasty did China attain something like its former extent and glory, and although the Sui did not last long, it laid the foundation for the extraordinary cultural and economic golden age of the Tang dynasty that followed.
During the Six Dynasties Period the Han dynasty state cult of Confucius declined, Daoism developed into a full-blown religion, and Buddhism was introduced and rapidly spread throughout China.
Folk songs were popular and continued to be adapted by the literati, as they had during the Han dynasty under the direction of the Music Bureau. Literary poetry also flourished, marked by the five-character line that the Music Bureau had popularized. There were wonderful rollicking drinking songs, elegant poems of nature and of spiritual questing, and, of course, political poetry as well. Cao Cao, the ruler of the Kingdom of Wei, was a notable literary poet and patron of poetry, as were his two sons. In this tumultuous time, as J. D. Frodsham notes, “Life may not have been nasty and brutish; but it was undoubtably short. In perusin
g the biographies of the officials of this epoch, one is struck by the frequency with which the phrases ‘executed in the marketplace,' ‘permitted to strangle himself,' ‘was killed by marauding soldiery,' and the like, write finish to many a career. A violent and bloody end was a commonplace of the time…. Small wonder then that the poetry of this period is deeply concerned with the terrors of old age and death.”1 Perhaps it is no surprise that in an era of such upheaval, some of the finest poetry was written by Tao Qian (also called Tao Yuan-ming), whose work is known for its Daoist, romantic celebration of retreat from the cares of the world into nature. Tao Qian does have an aspect of what Burton Watson calls “thanatophobia, the morbid fear of death,” particularly in his elegies, the coffin-puller songs, based (as Watson notes) upon “the dirges sung by the men of Han times as they pulled the hearse to the graveyard.”2 Tao Qian's poetry is known for its plain diction, spiritual and imaginative depth, and celebration of the ordinary, and its Daoist reverence for the spiritual aspect of nature deeply influenced later poets—notably Wang Wei, the great Tang dynasty poet of pastoral Buddhism.
1 J. D. Frodsham and Ch'eng Hsi, An Anthology of Chinese Verse: Han Wei Chin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. xxiv.
2 Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 49.
CAO CAO
(155–220)
Cao Cao, the founder of the Wei Kingdom, was an important warlord who carved his kingdom from the fragments of the Han dynasty in the north of China. He was also an important prose writer and poet whose literary reputation has grown in recent centuries. He was descended from a powerful palace eunuch, who adopted his father and left him wealth and assured political positions. Cao Cao's sons were also literary: Cao Pi (187–226), who upon his father's death accepted the abdication of the Han emperor and ruled as Emperor Wen, first emperor of the Wei dynasty, was an important poet, but he was jealous of his half brother Cao Zhi (192–232), an even more talented and imaginative poet, and kept him in isolation. Cao Cao, his sons, and the Seven Masters of the Jianan Period all made up a school of writing called the Jianan Period. A champion of literature as a Confucian rectifier in morally decadent times, Cao Cao is particularly noted for his ballad-form (yuefu) poems. Around twenty-two of his poems survive.
Watching the Blue Ocean
I go to the east coast cliff
to watch the blue ocean.
How vast the water's waves and waves
while widespread cliffs and isles jut up.
Trees and bushes cluster
and a hundred weeds grow rampant.
The autumn wind grieves
as billows rise one by one.
The journey of the sun and moon
starts out there in the middle.
The scintillating River of Stars
spills upward out of it.
How lucky I am to be standing here
feeling such passion I must chant this poem!
Song of Bitter Cold
Going north up Taihang Mountain,
how rugged and tall is the road
twisting like goat intestines
and ruining the wagon wheels.
The trees are keening
as the north wind grieves.
A bear squats right in my path
and tigers and leopards growl to either side.
People are few in this valley
and the snow swirls down heavily.
Stretching my neck I utter a long sigh.
I miss many people on this long journey.
My heart is so low,
I wish I could just return to the east,
but the water is deep, the bridge broken,
and I pace back and forth midway,
confused, having lost my old road.
Dusk and I have no place to stay
as slowly the sun sails away.
Both horse and rider are hungry
as I shoulder my pack and gather firewood,
hack ice with an axe to make porridge,
thinking, as the song “East Mountain”1
echoes, echoes in my grief.
1 “East Mountain”: a poem from the Book of Songs about an official's return after a long absence.
RUAN JI
(210–263)
Ruan Ji was born in what is today Weishi County, Henan province. He was an official of the Wei dynasty, the son of Ruan Yu, an important official and poet. Considered one of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest” (a famed group of writers of the Wei and Jin dynasties), he had a reputation as a Daoist wild man and drunkard, and his verse is often concerned with the mystical questions that Daoism raises.
This poem is from his long and darkly cynical sequence “Chanting My Thoughts,” which encodes an elliptical protest against the general turbulence of his times and against the rise of the Sima family and the gradual decline of the Cao family to whose rule he was loyal. Though not explicitly a political poet, Ruan Ji managed, like the twentieth-century Misty Poets, to express quite a bit of political content through obscure reference and poetic sleight of hand and through the satire and pessimism of many of his works. Often in China, this sort of subtlety has been an essential survival skill for poets who are also politicians and whose words may come back to haunt them when the political winds shift.
from Chanting My Thoughts
1
At night I can't fall asleep,
get up and sit to play my zither.
Through thin curtains I see bright moon
as light breeze flaps my garment.
A lonely wild goose shrieks from far wilderness;
gliding birds call in the Northern Woods.
I pace my room hoping to see what?
Alone, longing, sorrow hurts my heart.
FU XUAN
(217–278)
Fu Xuan was a poet of the Western Jin dynasty who wrote primarily in the Music Bureau style. Sixty-three of his poems survive. He was known to have been extraordinarily prolific, but most of his work has been lost. Despite being impoverished and orphaned as a child, he became rich and famous, largely because of his literary genius.
In the Chinese tradition it is common for male writers to write in a female voice. The author usually assumes the mask of a particular female character—a vain, ambitious woman, a nouveau riche, a ceremonial goddess, or a wife separated from her spouse. Rarely, however, does the male poet achieve the compelling and enlightened sympathy for the maltreatment of women that is one of the hallmarks of Fu Xuan's poetry. The devaluation of women in Chinese society rests in part on economics, and these attitudes are likely to be shared by women as well as men. As one woman from today's Sichuan province puts it, “Girls are no use. They can't inherit your house or your property. You struggle all your life, but who gets your house in the end? Your daughters all marry out and belong to someone else.”1 Such attitudes are deeply rooted in Chinese culture. As the female hero of a Six Dynasties folktale states, “My unhappy parents have six daughters but no son… so they have no real descendants…. Since we cannot work to support them, but are simply a burden to them and no use at all, the sooner we die the better.”2
To Be a Woman
It is bitter to be a woman,
the cheapest thing on earth.
A boy stands commanding in the doorway
like a god descended from the sky.
His heart hazards the four seas,
thousands of miles of wind and dust,
but no one laughs when a girl is born.
The family doesn't cherish her.
When she's a woman she hides in back rooms,
scared to look a man in the face.
They cry when she leaves home to marry—
just a brief rain, then mere clouds.
Head bowed, she tries to compose her face,
her white teeth stabbing red lips.
She bows and kneels endl
essly,
even before concubines and servants.
If their love is strong as two stars
she is like a sunflower in the sun,
but when their hearts are water and fire
a hundred evils descend on her.
The years change her jade face
and her lord will find new lovers.
Once as close as body and shadow,
they will be remote as Chinese and Mongols.
Sometimes even Chinese and Mongols meet
but they'll be far as polar stars.
1 W. J. F. Jenner, and Delia Davin, eds., Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 130.
2 Chen Jianing, The Core of Chinese Fiction (Beijing: New World Press, 1990), p. 24.
ZI YE
(third-fourth centuries)
The songs of “Lady Midnight,” or Zi Ye, were attributed to a young woman who lived during the Jin dynasty. The sexual frankness of her work suggests that she was a singing girl (courtesan).
The History of the Tang states that her songs were sung with intense grief, and the music to which they were set was supposed to have been deeply plaintive.
There are 117 poems called Zi Ye poems in the great anthology of Music Bureau poems. Whether there was one woman who wrote these poems or whether the Zi Ye poems represent a whole tradition is a question that remains unresolved. Nevertheless, the set of poems creates a powerful and unified effect, and they have been imitated by great poets such as Li Bai. Their direct, punning, erotic nature carries across the centuries with undiminished fire.
Three Songs
1
At sundown I step out my front door
and see passing by—you,
your face so dazzling, hair mesmerizing,
perfume filling all the road.
2
Last night I didn't comb my hair.
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 11